Monday, December 20, 2004

My trip to Estonia & Berlin

As I mentioned before, I went to Tallinn, Estonia for ICFP, and to
Berlin, Germany to hang out with Anna.
To see photos of Tallinn, Estonia, click here,
and to see photos of Berlin click here.
If you see a photo you like, click on it to see the larger version. Some of the photos there are from Ganesh since I mostly wasn't carrying my camera with me.
All in all, I had a great time. Berlin and Tallinn are both
beautiful and interesting. The conference was really good. I gave
two talks. People were much more interested in and enthusiastic about
Cabal than I realized, which is nice. I'm happy that people
appreciate and know my work. My talks went pretty well, especially
the 2nd one, where I think came off as energetic and interesting; I
got the group to laugh a few times. Mine was almost the last talk of
the whole conference (in fact, it was supposed to be, but they added
one person after me), so people were pretty tired and relaxed by the
end.
I hung out a lot with folks from the Haskell chat room, and with
Simon Marlow and David Roundy. There are some photos of them all in
the photo section. I had about 1.5 days of free time, and so I took a
tour of the old town with Ravi, Ganesh & David. We also did a bike
tour, which is a great way to tour a place, and we saw some museums.
The technical aspects of the conference were great as well, but
this isn't the forum for that :)
Berlin's culture and history are fascinating since they've had so
much impact on our own culture and recent history. It was really neat
to get to see The Wall, or what's left of it. The whole city has a
marker where the wall used to be, just some bricks instead of concrete
that make a line to show you. Be sure to check out the photos.
It's so bizarre to think that you're sitting, reading in a park, in
a spot where you would have been shot 20 years ago for being there.
I remember that time, but only very little, and of course, I didn't
understand much about it at that age.
I had never actually seen the photo of the boarder guard leaping
over barbed wire (seen here)
but it's all over the place in anything that talks about the cold war.
I spent a bit of time at Checkpoint Charlie. There's a museum
there which has been there since before the wall fell, just
documenting everything. For instance there's the VW bug that had a
smaller engine put in so it could be used to smuggle people out. Anna
and I also I took a bike tour that was all about the wall. She was
working some days, so we specialized in romantic dinners. There are a
lot of great places to eat in Berlin.
The Reichstag
is another fascinating bit of Berlin. It was burned (probably by the
Nazis as an excuse for cracking down on communists) and not really
used I guess until a few years ago. The new glass dome that was built
recently is quite different from the rest of the building, but very
symbolic of the transparency of democracy
There's a really neat club / artist studio called Tacheles
that was started by squatters in a bombed-out building in east Berlin
just after the fall of the wall. Scroll about half-way down for the
English, and take a look at the photos. Andy Adams-Moran had recommended
visiting this place, and Anna had already been there, of course.
It also gives you an idea of what East Berlin was like before all the
renovation. Eastern Berlin is just now starting to finish up
renovation. I guess it has basically been one big construction sight
for a long time.
I spent some time at the musical instrument museum. It was awesome.

Other Software: I'm primary author or maintainer on several software packages: The Haskell Cabal, a Haskell filesystem called Halfs. I also contributed some of the original code for Debian's apt-get cryptographic signature checking.

Social Software:I'm on Twitter as well as LinkedIn. For professional relationships, please find me there. Personal friends can find me on Facebook.

Research: I've been involved in a number of research projects and groups. I'm currently with Galois. Previously, I've worked for an AI research firm called Aetion, as well as several Ohio State University research groups.